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Pop Rock Nation

Category: News

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  • American Idol Season 10 – Who Makes The Final 12?

    If you missed last night’s American Idol show, head over to Popblerd!, which is where I’ll be writing my Wednesday play-by-plays. On this website, I’ll do the Thursday show, recapping who goes home.

    Last night, I thought Karen, Ashthon, and Thia could be in the bottom three. I also don’t know for sure how many folks are being eliminated tonight. I seem to remember the last time they brought thirteen to the finals, they eliminated two on the first night.

    Puffy and Dirty Money and Adam Lambert are on stage tonight (in separate performances) for the show. Diddy can have his Dirty Money. But give me my Danity Kane and Day 26 back, and even Donnie Klang if you have to.

    Ryno Seacrest said that Casey was sick and in the hospital, so he wasn’t on stage tonight. The group is performing Michael Jackson’s Wanna Be Starting Something and Rock With You. I couldn’t really tell how the performance was because I was too busy looking at Pia and waiting for her to appear on screen again. I do know that Jacob Lusk was doing some terrible dancing. They also went into Black Or White and Man In The Mirror. Looks like Thia wanted to sing Smile again, but they vetoed her and told her these were real Michael Jackson songs.

    Ryno interviewed Amanda Seyfried who is in the new movie, Red Riding Hood. Seyfried looks like she could’ve been in the animated film A Bug’s Life and she wouldn’t even need to be animated. Her eyes are so big, it’d take hubcaps to blind fold her. And I think the wolf is offended in the movie when she tells him, “What big eyes you have.”

    Ryno pulls Jacob, Stefano, and Karen to the stage. Karen is in the bottom three. Jacob and Stefano hugged like they just won the World Series.

    Adam Lambert is singing Aftermath. His hair is more poofy this time, like a young Brandon Walsh in his prime. And I’m jealous. I think he’s sizing up James Durbin for competition as Idol’s biggest wailer. There was this very odd live television moment where Ryno said he Dougie’d to the remix of Lambert’s song and then J. Lo called him out on it. She then bopped her shoulders back and forth and can get away with it because she can actually dance and she’s J. Lo. Though I’m not sure that was quite enough Dougie.

    Ryno invited Lauren, Ashthon, and Haley to the stage. Lauren isn’t leaving. We know this, man. She’s safe. Haley and Ashton are in the bottom three. Well, I predicted all girls, but I got the wrong third girl. Thia’s peoples definitely represented for her.

    Puffy and his Dirty Money crew are on stage to perform Coming Home. Where the heck is my girl Dawn? And why is Skylar Grey here? Wait, she may sing on the actual song.

    (I was told that Dawn was there, but for whatever reason, I missed her.)

    Did you know that Diddy hates the songs Tears Of A Clown and A House Is Not A Home? Did you also know that it’s easy to be Puff, but harder to be Sean? And really, it’s hard for him when his twins ask him why he ain’t marry their mom. Did you also know that he would’ve taken the bullet if he saw it?

    Puff decided to talk to the crew and you could see it in Jacob Lusk’s eyes that he was so happy that he didn’t try to make the band. He didn’t want to be the next E. Ness, Young City, Babs Bunny, or Q.

    Ryno is back with the girls in the bottom three. Karen is safe. If Haley is eliminated, we riot. Ashthon just gave Puff a dirty look because she’s coming home. She has to sing for the judges now to see if she’ll be saved.

    Ashthon did Diana Ross again and it was better than last night, but it’s not good enough to be saved. Ashthon is gone. David Cook sings Ashthon home. He sings the new goodbye song and it’s his own version of Don’t You Forget About Me. And it’s pretty terrible. She joins the likes of Brandon Rodgers, Vanessa Olivarez, Lindsey Cardinale, and David “Stripper” Hernandez as folks who are eliminated in the first week of the finals.

  • Paul’s Song Journal 3/10/11: OMD’s “History of Modern Part 1”

    Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily contemplating the end of, like, everything.

    ”History of Modern (Part 1)”
    Here’s the recently reunited British synth-pop pioneers Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark with the third single and title track from their latest album History of Modern, their first full-length studio record since 1996. While the band is best remembered for “If You Leave”, their contribution, via the soundtrack of Pretty in Pink, to the mid-80s John Hughes hit parade, it’s worth remembering that such lovely, lush, and lovelorn ballads (see also “Secret”, “So In Love”, “Forever Live and Die”) were the exception more than the rule in a catalog full of songs about technology, communications, science and religion.

    This is a band that named one of their albums Architecture & Morality (and boy, did they mean it!), and who turned the bombing of Hiroshima into one of the most chipper, urgently effervescent pop singles of the 80s (and that at the dawn of the Reagan Administration, when World War III seemed like a real possibility to this nine-year-old kid in Paddock Lake, Wisconsin, when the President could make a joke about outlawing Russia and letting the bombing commence immediately.)

    It’s that tradition of setting historical and/or philosophical and/or scientific inquiry to catchy, electronically-enhanced three minute pop ditties that OMD plays to on their latest. “History of Modern Part 1” is, more than anything, an adorable piece of insistent melodic candy in a shiny, shiny wrapper. But its lyrics tap into what might otherwise be a terrifying contemplation. Not just the inevitability of physical death, but something even greater and even more unfathomable. And they do it in a way that not only doesn’t sound doomy-gloomy, but actually conveys a feeling of – yeah! – liberation, man!

    This song finds me at a strange moment, what with all the rotten things afoot in the State of Wisconsin. For the last six or eight weeks, each morning and evening local news broadcast has offered up a increasingly overstocked buffet of fresh outrages; and it’s been surreal to see those homegrown outrages – it’s all happening just ten miles down the road – amplified in the broadcasts and web-pages of national and international news media. There are few times – no times, in fact – I can remember being as consumed with anger over abstractions like “rights” and “democracy” as I have been these last few weeks, and at one point, I had to make a conscious decision to step back and remember to – y’know – be a person.

    Inside the Wisconsin State Capitol, February 19, 2011
    “History of Modern” is more than just a healthy step back though. It’s an astronomical-scale zoom-out. While I might be keeping a running tally of “Likes” on the “Recall Alberta Darling (R-River Hills)” facebook page (it topped 4000 today) to compare with my running tally of “Likes” on the “Recall Mark Miller (D-Monona)” page (150 so far), this is a song about the recall efforts currently being mounted by the cosmos against, in OMD’s words, “all that went before and all that follows this.”

    Earlier this week, I was feeling a little bummed out watching the news and seeing all the signs taken down from the Capitol, whose marble walls, for weeks, had turned into a spontaneous, ever expanding, interactive mosaic of citizen outrage – one of the coolest works of collective outsider art I’ve ever witnessed. Mixed media with blue painters tape. And then there it all was on the news, all laid out in piles for people to reclaim if they so desired. Each sign has been photographed for posterity; some, it’s been said, are even Smithsonian-bound. Eventually, the signs would all have to come down sometime. Everyone knew that. But it was still sad when it actually happened.

    And then there’s OMD singing to me from my iPod: “All will be erased, and replaced.”

    A strangely hopeful reminder of the Almighty Whatever’s pending Repeal and Replace legislation which will certainly pass at some point, no matter how many people take to the streets in protest.

  • First Look (and Free Download!) Yeasayer’s “I Remember” Video and EP

    The fourth single from ”Odd Blood”
    For Valentine’s Day this year, the indie-popsters Yeasayer delivered a heart-shaped (or rather head-of-an-aging-biker-shaped) box of nostalgic synth-pop candy in the form of the fourth single from their 2010 sophomore album Odd Blood. The song’s called “I Remember” and in addition to delivering a typically strange/gross/cheesy/beautiful video (not quite as distractingly icky as their last), the band has made a three-track EP of the song available for free download. Awwwwww. How sweet, right?

    The EP contains the original album version of the song along with two remixes. The first, by Painted Palms (who posted their own free EP a couple months ago), is a small-but-lovable psychedelic trifle. At just under three-and-a-half minutes, it doesn’t go much of anywhere, but it sounds cool enough. But the second remix, by the Belgian house dj duo Villa is an eight-minute widescreen epic of digital-age longing – a sonic Doctor Zhivago for the Facebook set – built around the song’s original structure and vibe (no thumping club beats here!) but heightening its atmosphere and drama with patterns of glitches and loops to make the whole thing feel like a night spent alone in a city apartment, watching the nightlife below as it happens without you, and wishing upon a falling drunk that the phone would ring.